Mario Party: The Top 100 Review

After over a dozen parties, we finally have a portable collection of mini-games. Although there are tons of games to play in Mario Party: The Top 100, will the party last all night long or are you better off ditching early?

Looks like Yoshi finally got his little hands on a Super Mushroom!

First of all, let's admire the fact that Mario Party: The Top 100 contains a whopping 100 mini-games from past entries in the series. No matter which way you slice it, that's impressive. You'll encounter familiar mini-games from the original Nintendo 64 game all the way to the Wii U's Mario Party 10 although the portable spin-offs are unfortunately unrepresented. On a similar note, why are there only 3 mini-games from Mario Party 8? I have fond memories of that game, but I digress. There's a pretty nifty system that allows you to mark your favourite games so you can easily access them whenever you wish. Thankfully, the mini-games are organized very well with plenty of categories and sub-categories that'll help you narrow down which ones you'll want to play. Overall, the amount of games is impressive and long-time fans such as myself will relive a lot of great memories as they play.

Of course, mini-games aren't as fun without some sort of modes to play them within. Although you can merely select which individual games to play, there are a handful of additional modes to enjoy, too. The single player campaign has you battle computer-controlled opponents as you progress through four island maps with nodes that contain the mini-games. You'll unlock the games for the other modes by playing through this Minigame Island campaign as well as extras that you can browse within the Collection menu.

This looks like fun but I bet the Thwomps aren't having a good time...

When it comes to multiplayer, there are three additional modes that you can enjoy either solo or multiplayer via Download Play or Local Play. These include Championship Battles that is basically a tournament mode, Decathlon which is similar but you get a certain amount of points after each game, and Minigame Match which has you play on a board like the ones in the recently released Mario Party Star Rush. It's awesome that you can enjoy all of this content via Download Play (multiplayer with only one copy of the game) for up to four players. Also, I should mention that the 3D effect looks pretty good and the fact that they implemented it for all the games is admirable.

As you can probably already tell, Mario Party: The Top 100 is certainly lacking when it comes to modes. With only one board to play on and all the other modes being either free-for-alls or tournaments, there isn't much structure to tie all these mini-games together. There's only so much fun you can have selecting mini-games à la carte so the fact that there isn't that many modes makes last year's Star Rush a far superior game in this regard. Finally, I found the selection of characters to leave a lot to be desired. You can only play as Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, Wario, Waluigi, Yoshi, and Rosalina. That's right; there's no Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, Toad, Toadette, or Birdo to be found. Considering this is a compilation of past Mario Party games, the fact that it's missing so many characters is quite disappointing.

Hey, Mario; you're running in the wrong direction!

Although Mario Party: The Top 100 contains an impressive amount of mini-games that are still super-fun to play, the modes to enjoy the mini-games within are unfortunately lacking. That being said, if you're looking for a comprehensive Mario Party experience that you can enjoy with a few friends on the go then this is one collection that you should definitely not overlook.